> Does the (deeply tedious) myth of the cowboy really have that much of
> a death grip on the national consciousness? Back in the fifties and
> sixties TV and the movies were crammed full of horse operas -- no
> more. HBO's new expletive-intensive Western (which I haven't seen) is
> the first major Western in years, and it doesn't seem to have
> attracted much attention.
As others have pointed out, the cowboy figure is only one of a number of alternative embodiments of this American myth. I'm not sure why Westerns fell out of fashion -- perhaps the TV and movie audiences just got tired of them. In any case, I think the myth that engendered the cowboy, detective, Han Solo, etc., figures lives on.
Perhaps the best embodiment of it -- in the sense of illustrating the Bush appeal -- I can think of is the Gary Cooper figure (forget the character's name) in High Noon. The quiet, strong defender of law and order in the perilous frontier, who doesn't enjoy violence at all, but "does what a man's gotta do," and proves that the Quaker approach to evil just isn't practical.
If Shrub were just the deranged, vicious, trigger-happy ghoul a lot of his detractors picture him as, he would be far from as popular as he is. But he is able to project that steady, reliable protector-of-women-and-children side of Cooper -- don't talk much or put on fancy East-Coast airs, but ya needn't fear the outlaws, ma'am, when I'm around.
Kerry, on the other hand, seems to be going for the image of John Wayne on the beach of Iwo Jima, or some such place -- but somewhat confusingly blended with the picture of a '60s hippie dope-smoking Commie radical. (Actually, no one seems to have charged him with having been a druggie yet, perhaps because it would raise the awkward subject of the stories of Shrub's coke habit. But his having protested the Vietnam War, plus his French-speaking and wind-surfing propensities, seem to be a good enough substitute. Fortunately, he has had the sense not to play his classical guitar in public.)
The trouble is, he hasn't managed to fit into the John Wayne costume very well (I'm sure that his heart really isn't in it -- somebody on his campaign staff probably put him up to the "reporting for duty" act in Boston), whereas Shrub plays the High Noon role almost to perfection. There seem to be signs that Kerry is getting ready to drop the wounded war hero shtik and try a new act, but it's not yet clear what.
I'm not saying that this mythical stuff is *all* voters are looking at -- at least some of them have matters like employment and health care on their minds, too. But the Kerry campaign's positions on that kind of subject are pretty thin gruel, let's face it, and so far he has been treating them as a kind of afterthought. Perhaps now that the Repub blow-out in the Big Apple is over, with all the delegates having presumably gotten their rocks off satisfactorily, the campaign will move on to more substantive matters.
Jon Johanning // jjohanning at igc.org __________________________________________________ It isn’t that we believe in God, or don’t believe in God, or have suspended judgment about God, or consider that the God of theism is an inadequate symbol of our ultimate concern; it is just that we wish we didn’t have to have a view about God. It isn’t that we know that “God” is a cognitively meaningless expression, or that it has its role in a language-game other than fact-stating, or whatever. We just regret the fact that the word is used so much. — Richard Rorty